Photograph © George A. Jardine

I created this video to help demystify the relationship between exposure values that are captured by your camera, and the brightness values they are mapped to during raw processing.

Please note that this video is an update of video #3 from the Image Correction Master Class. So if you’ve purchased that video series, you already have a (very slightly different) version of this video.

This video is free. Simply enter your e-mail address below, and the monkey behind the curtain will send you the link..   –   TRT: 22:50

Photographs © George A. Jardine

I read over and over again, that somehow the holy grail for digital photographers is to have a “fast and efficient workflow”…. or something like that. I even read recently that with a certain e-book, you’d soon be “importing digital images into Lightroom with your eyes closed.” Funny they should put it that way, because in my workshops, it seems most students are already doing just exactly that when they first walk through the door.

I guess for a culture hooked on fast food, marketing your wares that way makes sense. After all, who doesn’t want fast and efficient?

My goal is to break photographers of the habit, and try to help them open their eyes to the larger picture of what actually happens during import. If you’re the type of person who would rather think through the issues for yourself, and then build a workflow that fits your individual design goals for your long-term library organization, then I have a new article for you. It’s called Heresy In Library Organization, and you can find it on DigitalPhotoPro.com, by clicking here.

Writing articles for Digital Photo Pro Magazine is one of my favorite things to do. You can find a list of all the articles I’ve written for them at the bottom of my “free stuff” page, by clicking here.

GPS: 45° 25′ 55.63″ N 12° 20′ 15.18″ E

Photograph © George A. Jardine

In nearly every class I teach, and in every workshop, I hear from many photographers that they simply don’t know where to start, when approaching image correction.

Tone and color correction is not a mystery, but mastering it does take time and practice. The goal of this new series is to help you become fluent in correcting your own pictures—as quickly as possible. We accomplish that by guiding you toward a complete understanding of the tools, in both Lightroom 4 and 5. (With a healthy dose of Photoshop thrown in for good measure, in the portrait tutorials.)

The new series is 21 videos, with over 5 hours of content. Flash and HTML5 versions are ready now, as well as online streaming for the iPad and download files. DVD’s for Amazon, will be available shortly.

Click here to read more.

GPS: 39°11’56.89″ N -123°45’6.64″ E

Photograph © George A. Jardine

Coming up in early June, I’ll be offering a brand-new workshop in conjunction with the Lone Tree Photography Club, and sponsored by the Front Range Photography Meetup Group. This workshop will offer a soup-to-nuts look at image preparation for output. We will do a deep dive on several techniques for sizing, sharpening, and compression for web output, as well as for printing to ink jet printers.

This new class will be four hours in length, from 9AM – 1PM, on Saturday, June 1, and will be limited to 20 participants. It will be held at the Lone Tree Civic Center, and admission will be $29.95, payable directly to the Lone Tree Photography Club. As a bonus, everyone who signs up for this new workshop, will also receive a free copy of my Lightroom Library 4 Video DVD, a $34.95 value.

For more information, or to register, check out the Lone Tree Photography Club posting, here.

Hope to see you there!

Photograph © George A. Jardine

For those of you living in Colorado, I’m offering 5 Lightroom workshops coming up in May, at the Colorado Photographic Arts Center. These are hands-on, evening workshops that will cover the entire Lightroom Library and Develop workflows.

Workshop Dates and Registration Links:

•   May 1, 2013 — Introduction To Adobe Lightroom

 

•   May 8, 2013 — Digital Library Structre & Lightroom Library

 

•   May 15, 2013 — Lightroom Develop Basics – Intro

 

•   May 22, 2013 — Lightroom Develop Module – Advanced

 

•   May 29, 2013 — Using Lightroom With Photoshop

Indivudual classes are $75 each, with a member discount available.

All classes will be held in the Colorado Photographic Arts Center Gallery “Belmar”, in Lakewood. Click here to see the map to the workshop location.

Hope to see you there!

My first (video) book is finally up on the iTunes Bookstore! The moment I saw the iBooks Author application, I knew this was a genius move on Apple’s part. I wanted to have my videos available as iBooks from the beginning. (It just took me a little while to get the first one completed!)

I’ve been making my videos available as downloads for iPad users since their introduction. The format is right, it’s portable, and best of all, the tutorials look great on the iPad. The iBook format is nice because it gives me the chance to include more text outlining the subject matter for each video. Plus, you get to see more pictures! :-)

Click here to visit the iTunes page for the book.

The iBook version is just $24.99 on the iTunes Bookstore, and it contains the same 12 videos as the online version. Why is it $5 less than buying the online version directly from me? Well, frankly, there are two small differences with the iBooks version. First, the iBooks version has a text listing of the video chapter markers, but the iBook Author app currently does not give me any way to make that list clickable, to take you directly to a corresponding timecode within the video. Second, the current version of the iBooks app does not let you beam the video stream to an AppleTV. So purchasers of the “online” version do get one or two minor benefits.

Having said all that, the iBook is here, and a great value at just $24.95. Download one and post a review for me today!

Photograph © George A. Jardine

As I was preparing for my upcoming Using Lightroom With Photoshop class at CPAC, I stumbled on a retired video tutorial that doesn’t deserve to be lost in the parade of updates. So I’ve resurrected it, and found a permanent home for it on my “free stuff” page of videos and magazine articles.

As it turns out, nothing really changed between Lightroom 3 and Lightroom 4 in the way Photoshop Integration works, so this video is still completely valid. It goes into great detail, mapping out the exact paths open to you when going from Lightroom to Photoshop. It also details what happens when your ACR plug-in is not up-to-date with your version of Lightroom, and what to do about it.

Click here to see the Flash version of the video.

And if you’re feeling adventurous, click here to see the HTML5 version of the video.

As always, iPad users can click either link, and will get routed to a specially-formatted video for your device.

GPS: 45°25’50″ N 12°19’48″ E

Photograph © George A. Jardine

Coming up next week, we have just a couple of remaining seats for my new classes at the Colorado Photographic Arts Center.

The first class — Getting Started with Adobe Lightroom — takes digital photographers through the entire process of installing the program, designing your photo library structure, hardware choices, backup, etc. If you’re just getting started building your digital library, this class is for you. Class time is from 6 – 9 PM on March 6th.

The following Wednesday we jump to a more advanced part of the workflow, taking a look at how to use Lightroom with Adobe Photoshop. In Using Lightroom With Photoshop, you will learn everything you need to know to take your photos back and forth to Photoshop for advanced editing.

The classes are $60 each, with a member discount available.

These classes will be held in the Colorado Photographic Arts Center Gallery “Belmar”, in Lakewood. Click here to see the map to the workshop location.

Hope to see you there!

Photographs © George A. Jardine

Sadly, I receive an e-mail something like this at least once a week. Sometimes as often as once a day. This one came in this morning:

I’ve already written a bit about how we all get into this situation, but this e-mail reminded me that it’s more than just the problem of trying to organize a large digital photo library by subject. That’s a sleeper that has not yet received nearly enough attention. Of course I don’t try to find my pictures by remembering the date they were shot!, but I digress. It’s actually more about our approach to dealing with digital files in general.

I think that basic approach can be summarized by saying, you make multiple copies of your important files, because you can! Of course working on computers reinforces that idea that you ‘make a copy, so that you have a backup.’

Indeed, many of the so-called pundits in the space take it one step further, by basically saying your best backup strategy is to have “lots of copies.” I would call that pretty sloppy thinking, but in the end, it’s more or less true. Having said that, I do feel that the heart of most of our organizational problems is closely related—falling into the trap of simply relying on having multiple copies… because after all, they’re all identical, right?

And this is especially true, if you try to closely follow the organize-by-subject strategy. If you put pictures of your wife into one folder that is named with her name, and you put pictures from your travels to Croatia into a folder named Croatia, where will you put photos of her, the next time she travels to Croatia with you?

This is the fundamental problem that databases solved quite a while ago. But still, for most non-technical people the idea that precisely where a digital photo lives is completely irrelevant, is just a bit hard to wrap your head around. We’re so completely wreaked by relying on file and folder icons, that we’ve surrendered to it, and want to forever organize our photos by subject. It’s in our bones.

My solution to this problem grew out of thinking a bit about the differences between digital libraries, and film libraries. For those of us who still have film libraries, you know that you tucked those precious originals into poly-sleeves, and stored them away very carefully. Because you had to. There was always only one original.

Then when finally sitting down to think about how I wanted to organize my digital library moving forward, I started to see the problem from a very different point of view. All of a sudden, it started to seem incredibly obvious that all I needed to do was to begin treating my digital photos the same as I treated my film originals. In terms of duplicates and backups, anyway. The idea is incredibly simple, and just requires that you tell yourself to start thinking of one device (or one set of devices…), as your “originals.”

Of course it’s a silly idea. The real originals were on the camera card, and were erased long ago. But setting aside one hard drive or RAID device, and putting a big label on the outside of the case that says “Masters,” or “Originals,”—whatever it takes to identify that one device as your master library—is the place to start. I call mine, “Photo Library Working,” because that says to me, ‘this is the one place you should always to go when you are correcting color, cropping, making exports,’ or whatever. This is THE… Photo Library. The originals.

And then I have at least two more identical devices, labeled “Photo Library Backup,” and “Photo Library Archive.” I always do my organizational work and color correction on the “Working” drive, and daily, incremental backups get pushed to the “Backup” and “Archive” drives.

Of course there is nothing magical about anointing one special device as the “master”. But it does establish the idea that you need to break the habit of treating digital files as if each copy has the same value. It’s just a mental discipline to force yourself to always work in one place. After that, the rest is easy. Incremental backups to devices you keep off-site or whatever, become even more reassuring as an archive. If disaster strikes, you now have an exact mirror of your Working library, that you can mount up and be back up and running in just seconds. No tape, no decompressing archives, no muss, no fuss. No worrying that you might have lost some randomly placed file.

So if the prospect of organizing a completely neglected pile of digital photos seems impossible, I would suggest one simple starting point: buy a new drive, copy everything over to it, and start there. Bless it as the one, then start hammering it into shape. And back it up once in a while. Trust me. It will be worth the effort.

Sure, I still spend time going back and adding new scans of legacy material once in a while (see above…), and I’m also constantly tweaking raw photos from my travels. But it all happens in one place. And so when it comes to adding new photos to my library, or searching for something that a client needs, it all happens very quickly. I can put my hands on any version of any photo I’ve ever worked on, in seconds.

Photograph © George A. Jardine

Outdoor Photographer Magazine just published two new articles of mine, in the March 2013 issue. These are one-page, “Solutions” articles, that describe a single feature in about 600 words… so they are short and sweet.

One is on the Lightroom and Camera Raw Clarity control, and one is on Vibrance. To go directly to the online versions of these new articles, click here for Clarity, and click here for the article on Vibrance.

You can also find a complete list of all the magazine articles that I’ve written at the bottom of my “free stuff” page, here.

As always, comments are welcome.